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Home ¦ Reviews ¦ 2000AD Extreme Edition 14

Cover by Cliff Robinson

Review by Bryan Coyle
5th February 06

What to Expect: Bad City Blues, Silo and Tribal Memories. Behind a functional but impressive cover by the ubiquitous Cliff Robinson, there beats some thematically similar sci-fi fantasy that encompasses wide territories, but ultimately returns to the British sci-fi staple that people really are rather crap. Taken in the order in which I read them...

Originally Appeared In: Progs 468 - 477, 585-588 and 706 - 711

It’s been said that originality is undiscovered plagiarism, and based on his 2000AD career, undiscovered plagiarism isn't an accusation that could ever be levelled at Mark Millar. Originality is a highly-overrated concept, however - there's no point in having an original concept if you can't tell a story to go with it. How a story reads is infinitely more important than its content, but when spotting those elements you've ripped off from other sources stops the reader from enjoying the storyline, you're in trouble - it might not be too large an issue if that reader is the curator of the Oxford Library, but when it's a fourteen year-old boy who's never read books without pictures in them, you're really in trouble.

Millar isn't that bad a writer when he stops trying to crowbar in sound bites for his (admittedly thin) characters and Silo reads fine in itself - it's just that it smacks too much of an attempt to be self-consciously different, of a burning need to be cool. He opts for visceral horror over the more interesting concepts that he stumbles across, almost by accident, and never explores (disarming after the cold war, Victorian-era evolutionary fascism, the American view of the class mentality that permeates all factions of British society and history). Eventually, he eschews all pretence of psychological horror in favour of rubber monster-movie territory with a cat-eyed skeleton climbing from a corpse.

There's just too much taken from elsewhere to objectively see it as anything other than juvenile and contrived - that Millar devotes an entire page to an undisguised lift from the Shining and expects the reader to take it as a cliff-hanger is the best example of that, and it's all the more annoying because by no means a bad writer when he actually writes. Silo is a classic case of a writer that isn't actually writing, but instead mechanically constructing a story before he's actually got a final act. Dave D'Antiquis is a good artist for this kind of story, though. Claustrophobic and dark, he gives the material more weight than it deserves, and this is surely a forerunner of Dom Reardon's Caballistics artwork.

Like Silo, Tribal Memories represents a contrast to the later American writing of its scribe. Peter Milligan here displays a good eye and ear for characters and the attendant imagery of a comic story, though you'd be pressed to draw comparisons with the guy who writes Uncanny X-Men for the house of Marvel these days. With Tribal Memories, he deftly paces a story that doesn't try to be cool or force in sound bites - which is just as well, as the story itself is a bit hackneyed and clichéd, reminding me of an episode of something like the 1990s Outer Limits TV show. What he lacks here in terms of intellectual kudos, Milligan makes up for by simply telling a story. It isn't original, it has a poor ending, and the comments about slavery are hammered home shamelessly, but it’s undeniably a commendable effort.

In a way, it's probably the antithesis of the likes of Silo, which is actually a little depressing when you consider that Tribal Memories predates it by several years. Like televisual classic Roots, however, its more of a functional piece of moral posturing than an outright classic in its own right, and as long as no-one expects life-changing insights, its a fun read with a decent heart.

Making up the bulk of Extreme Edition 14 is Alan Grant and Robin Smith's Bad City Blue, which predates both of the other stories by some measure, but which touches on much the same territory as both, oddly. The inhabitants of an asteroid-bound space colony go slowly bonkers, reverting to pack savagery, so the (presumably rich) ruling class leave them to their fate and clear off to a planet-based colony, where we assume they intend to do their own chores and maintain their own machines, what with leaving the plebs that normally do such work behind to die when the asteroid they inhabit plunges into a black hole.

It's never explained why such an advanced civilisation never spotted such a hugely destructive universal event as a black hole when such things are usually several light-years across and planned a different route to avoid it, or why no-one else noticed the news repeating for several years. To point out plot inconsistencies in high-concept sci-fi is ultimately pointless though, as the whole raison d'être of high-concept is to have a fantastic background against which can be told human stories, and minor niggles like common sense just tend to get in the way.

Alan Grant has a few recurring themes in his work, much like his fellow 2000AD luminary Pat Mills, but where Mills tends towards exploring such themes at length, Grant has always used them to pad out a story he's planned out beforehand. As such, we get a fair dose of commentary on class mentality, the predisposition of mankind towards brutality, good ideas corrupted by rich men and their machinations - all of which happen to take place in a story about a mentally-deficient hardman who fights bounty hunters, robot jellyfish, and flies about on a big saucer shooting his shotgun at stuff. It's as enjoyable as it is daft, and it's very daft indeed.

My only gripe is that the ending seems abrupt, and as such, comes across as a bit forced, but up until then, its a good slice of retro 2000AD socialist rambling in amongst the 'loner with a gun' clichés much beloved of Warren Ellis. The forced devolution of the main character into what virtually amounts to a grunting savage is a nice touch, too.

Robin Smith is one of the classic workhorse artists for 2000AD that doesn't have a particularly impressive style, or tendency towards pop-up splash images that dominate the rest of the page, but he is reliable, and his style is unmistakeable. Just getting the mechanics of a comic page right is a job in itself, but Smith knows how to put together a clear and readable page. His flying sharks hint that he should do less futurist sci-fi, and more outright fantasy, although there's no faulting the material on show here.

All in all, it's a good mixed-bag approach to the Extreme Edition, and featuring material that might actually find favour with a modern British audience otherwise disinclined to read 2000AD. Well worth three quid of anyone's cash, even if you've got the issues each story appeared in readily to hand, and a good first issue for 2000AD head honcho Matt Smith after the departure of Alan Barnes. One that sets an admirably high standard for future editions.